Ebook Challenges: Competing with free and getting the timing right.
Mindy Stockfield, Hyperion; Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group; Steve Ross, formerly of Harper Collins; Michel Tamblyn, Kobo; Brian O’Leary, Magellan Media Partners. Publishers’ margins are very small. Products releases should be windowed. Same question arose in the ’50s when introducing mass market editions. Decided to release them later. Same with DVDs. Represents authors and so asks if you give it away for free what is author’s share of zero? Be careful on innovation in pricing because you can create a market expectation that you can’t deal with later if you model doesn’t work. Ebooks great for mid-list authors who can’t get a publisher to take them on. Ebooks as a small percentage of the industry can cause massive damage to the whole industry if not priced right. Electronic sales are not counted in best seller lists and difference in place in list is not much. If ebooks syphon off sales this can drop a major book on the list.
Kobo: giving first volume of a series, especially an old series, can work,and is also good as “training wheels”. Free commercial titles are a relative rarity so hard to develop information yet on what’s happening. Ebooks are a new release business. The first 90 days represents at least half of sales and windowing radically reduces the amount of sales. No evidence yet that low prices have hurt the industry as a whole.
Hyperion: came from Disney Channel, where they had a windowing strategy for every one of their shows. Feels it should be don’t on a title and author basis, especially since there is so little data available yet. Need to try a lot of new stuff to develop a database of what’s going on. Finding that if give away part of the book it pulls a lot of ebook sales. No need to give away the whole book. With “Long Tail” gave away free ebook with purchase of paper book and did well. Getting bad press on Amazon for not releasing digital edition. Looking back, delaying new Hitchhiker book by 6 weeks was too long. When released as ebook people didn’t know it was out and lost sales. Also got a lot of bad press from Apple fans as released an Apples edition at the same time as hard cover edition at the same price. Caused a lot of ill feeling when cheaper ebook was released.
Steve Ross: originally felt that the more you give away digital content the more you will sell print editions, but talked to a lot of industry people and their analysis and testing showed no examples of where free had pushed other sales. Has changed his mind about free. Market expectations created by Amazon at $9.99 will be difficult to break. Publishers don’t think that Amazon will continue its current pricing strategy much longer. Ebooks can have a detrimental effect on place in Times best seller list. Would window ebooks for books which release under 100,000 cause it will help sales.
